Many massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), e.g., online immersive virtual world games, attempt to provide some sort of lightweight experience to keep players engaged and involved when they are away from a desktop computer, game console, or other system capable of playing the full game. Lightweight experiences are those involving browsers, smaller programs than full game clients, or mobile computing devices, e.g., tablet computing devices, smartphones, etc. Conventional MMOs, however, have extremely limited interaction for situations with reduced interface levels like mobile or other small devices: they either have a “full interface” corresponding to their desktop or game console counterparts, or very little access at all. For example, some MMOs offer a subscription plan to enable users (also referred to herein as players) to participate in a minimal way, e.g., to “craft” or build game-related paraphernalia using mobile computing devices. However, vendors of MMOs are incentivized to provide as much of an immersive experience to game players as possible—no matter what device they are using—because game players are typically willing to spend a lot of money to enhance their gameplay.
Providing an immersive experience on mobile computing devices is challenging because of several problems. One problem is that there is limited screen space on mobile computing devices. A full game experience available on a large screen is very difficult to mimic on smaller screens. Another problem is that processors used in mobile devices presently are not as powerful as the processors used in desktop computers and game consoles. Still another problem relates to game server design. For various types of games, e.g., “database” centric games where each character is one of many people placing demands on a database, each player who is allowed to interact through the web or other lightweight environment provides roughly the same server load as a desktop full-graphics player because the use by both players is translated to a series of database calls. The players may consider a lighter web interface less than the full experience, but web interfaces would still cause massive slowdowns if applied to game servers. For at least these reasons, conventional lightweight interfaces are generally limited to interactions with servers that do not enable gameplay, and so cannot slow down game servers.
Many MMOs are now being architected on datacenters, e.g., AWS offered by Amazon® or Azure® offered by Microsoft®. Datacenter based game architectures can handle large amounts of user activities if they can be appropriately managed and if the interface design problem, which is different for every mix of activities a user might want, can be solved. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.